Saturday, February 09, 2008

Shane's Kirby Girl

Hey, check out this great drawing Shane Glines did of Jack Kirby's character: Crystal the Elemental girl.I love the colors too! Shane, explain your theory on the colors...Boy, if someone made a superhero on TV designed like Shane's take, it would be a huge hit.Here's the poster it was cartooned from.Here's a modern reprint with colors pumped too much:I loved this character when I was a kid.

I want to hear Mr. Glines' theory on color. That is an excellent drawing. Very cute, appealing, and well-drawn. He really got Kirby's inking style down. It looks like someone from the old Marvels had inked it. Amazing stuff.

Wow, now that's an attractive and fun looking drawing. The trouble if someone from TV got their mitts on it they'd phuggitup.Now if he produced it himself and put it on the internet, that'd be worth watching.

Wow, when I first saw that, I figured it was a re-issue or a scan from a comic that hadn't been touched since the 60's!

I especially love the outline work. I have the most trouble duplicating that style, and Shane rocks for that ( and everything else )! First time I noticed his talent for that was when I went to the comic book store and bought the Spumco 'Comic Book'. Still got it.

I like Shane's design of this girl. However, I kind of feel like that ever since "Batman:The Animated Series" that the characters look a bit more angular and stylized towards Bruce Timm's style. I liked it when they looked more realistic twenty, thirty years ago.

On the colour of that reprint, it looks far too bright but I wonder if printing had been better, would the original have looked like that anyway?

I remember a classic UK cartoon that people were having an argument on whether the main character was green or brown. He looked a sort of dull, dirty green on the television. As it happened, he was meant to be a pretty bright green but because they were on a shoestring budget and film stock and development was comprimised, the colour was really muted when it went to television.

Seems to me it's inaccurate to describe the colours as "pumped too much." Surely it's just that cheap printing techology has advanced, and that the original artwork had extremely vivid colours to compensate for the cheap inks and paper? So any "pumping" was actually done at the time, rather than in the modern printing? If anything they should maybe have de-pumped it rather than accurately reproducing the colours. :)

"Surely it's just that cheap printing techology has advanced, and that the original artwork had extremely vivid colours to compensate for the cheap inks and paper?"

True. Notice the color of the paper the original was printed on, versus the background of the reprint. Yes, the original paper obviously doesn't age well, but even when new it was never the stark white like the pages these books are being reprinted on.

This is an often discussed issue in the world of reprinting older comic books - and in this case the decision was clearly to go with the original color selections, regardless of how it was going to look on the white paper (read: awfully bright). There aren't many options, but in the end this is often the route chosen, even if the results can be a bit rough on the eyes.